Some things I learnt crossing the Atlantic in a sailing boat (Part 2 of 2)

Ilustration: Carmen Pérez

"It's remarkable how quickly a good and favorable wind can sweep away the maddening frustrations of shore living.” — Ernest K. Gann

This is the continuation of my previous post, about the things I learnt -- or experienced -- crossing the Atlantic in a sailing boat. Here are more insights:

You can get to like things you normally don’t

I am the kind of person who has a really hard time staying put. I like being active, doing things. During the trip I spent a lot of my time reading, learning German, writing and watching the ocean, but still there was too much free time left!

I don’t like cooking much and for sure, as many of you, I am not a fan of doing the dishes. But dealing with so much free time made me enjoy exactly those chores I try so hard to shun at home. 

Usually Paul – who is a good cook – cooked our three meals. The rule was that whoever cooked was free from washing the dishes. Most of the time I volunteered to do them as there were not many alternatives in the boat and I got to really like it.

Another fun thing to do was cooking, especially trying to keep the balance and not to get burnt while the waves tossed the boat around.

Persistence and patience will pay off

One of our mates, the architect, loved fishing. Almost every day he would sit for hours on end on a side of the boat with his fishing line trying to catch a fish but obviously he was down on his luck. One day we caught sight of a big fish very close to our boat. Daniel tried a hundred times to catch it, casting the hook with the bait close to it, but the fish seemed to be playing with him, stealing the bait without swallowing  the hook. We started cracking jokes about him and the fish making a fool of him. Yet another rotten fishing day. 

When sixteen days after our departure our fisherman did capture his first fish, it was an 8-kilo  Mahi Mahi that provided us food for five days. Pretty soon after the last piece of that fish was gone, he caught  another one – this time a 12-kilo one. This second fish was in almost every dish of all the meals until the last day of our trip. So in the end, our fisherman provided us with a sound amount of proteins for a good half of the trip.

A side story I have to tell is a metaphor of life – and how it vanished. Mahi Mahi’s are very beautiful and colorful fish, but as soon as they start dying, the colors begin to disappear and in  the end they turn just gray. You can see the lights fading slowly out .

You can hate things you normally like

I really like avocado, cinnamon and good fresh fish, but these very three things were the ingredients in every other dish served during the trip. We had avocado in almost every salad    and fish almost every day after the first catch. Mahi Mahi meat is very soft, tender and with not too many bones, which make it excellent for cooking. The first four dishes cooked with it tasted  amazing, but after ten days of eating the same fish, even though it was prepared in many different ways, I could not see it anymore. 

For several months after the trip I kept telling my wife that the only thing she had to do just to lose the sight of me was to cook something with fish, avocado or cinnamon. But now her chance is gone….

Don’t expect anything what you can’t have under control

This is related to the first point I mentioned in my previous post. Our expectations are usually the main source of our frustrations. It is not that we shouldn’t have expectations. What I mean is that we should somehow know – or learn – that far from everything is going to be under our control. You can be killing yourself to get something, but luck – all the variables you cannot see or influence – will always be a factor that matters most.

In my romantic fantasies I expected to see big things during this trip – I mean not only huge marine creatures but important events happening as well. Whales and dolphins were on my list. I read a lot about the amazing things people had experienced crossing the Atlantic, but the truth  is that during our voyage nothing happened most of the time. Nothing at all. It was just us, water, wind, sun during the day and the same us, water, wind and the moon and stars during the night. 

I spent days and especially nights on the deck waiting for this “big thing” to happen. Waiting  could count as a  job meanwhile nothing else could be done. There were  some days in a row when we didn’t see absolutely anything apart from water, wind, and so on.... Seeing another ship on the horizon, a bird flying close to the boat or a plane crossing the sky was a really big event.

Only a group of dolphins that came to play in front of our boat a couple of days, until...

Great things just happen

The last five days of the trip were just amazing! What didn’t happen in the previous 25 days got crammed into the last five.

Nights were always somehow special, but on night 25, a big ring out of nowhere around the moon with a kind of rainbow appearance, a gleaming nimbus – kind of. The moon was right at the top of the sky above the water and the halo its light created looked like a big hole in the roof of the Earth. There were many clouds around the ring, but none inside it, making it even more enigmatic and impressive-looking. The image captivated me to the point I thought that this was going to be the big thing to remember about this trip – how little did I know what was lying ahead of us... But there was going to be something else (in store for us). 

While other nice things cropped up in between, just the last night before arriving in Barbados, the most special show I could have imagined, took place. For the ones who don’t know it, in the sea there are some algaes and other organisms that produce bioluminescence when they are disturbed. Around midnight of that very last night we had a group of dolphins visiting us, but this time the luminescent glow coming and going with the waves in the middle of the dark night made the dolphins’ visit so very special. 

We couldn’t see the dolphins swimming in the water. We could only see the shapes created by the glow around them. They looked like phantoms dancing in the sea. At times a group of them were swimming together looking like something very big suddenly breaking apart when turning in different directions, just for a few seconds later to come back together again. They continued guiding us with this particular dance game for about an hour until they finally vanished into the night disappearing in the dark.

My family is everything

That last night I didn’t sleep in my cabin. I wanted to spend the whole night on the deck enjoying the sky as I knew that I wouldn't be able to see thousands of stars drawing the Milky Way for a long time. The lights of the city would be hiding them...

The next day all of us were excited. We knew that during the evening we would see the shape of Barbados in front of us. I took my mobile phone and turned it on to have it handy when the internet connection would be available again. After so many days sailing across the ocean I only wanted to talk to my wife and my mother. I was in seventh heaven when the first signal came through and I could start chatting with my wife and later with my mother and kids. We would still need to sail for three to four hours more to see the land. My wife predicted that we would first see land at 6:00 PM. 

Before leaving Switzerland I’d bought some Swiss chocolates as a gift for my colleagues in the boat. They decided to use them every day as a prize for the one who could better guess how many miles we had sailed that day. A bet we had every day at 7:00 PM. The last pieces were reserved for the first one to see land. I was not really paying attention to the horizon as I was talking to my wife, but she was right, the oldest member of the group saw land exactly at 6:00 PM and won the remaining chocolates. After four more hours we were dropping anchor in Barbados.

It was great, but I am still me

I admit that, after having my kids, this has been one of the greatest experiences in my life. I felt invincible when we were arriving in Barbados. I was walking on the moon. But the truth is that it  hasn’t changed me or the way I see life. I learnt many things, but I started forgetting them in the daily rush of our lives. But now that life is not going through the best times it’s been great to travel back to those instants and re-learn the little things that can make me happy. I don’t  need to cross the Atlantic to feel those moments again, especially when my family is with me...   But I’ll be looking for new adventures, too!